From the House of the Dead (Z mrtvého domu)

Opera From the House of the Dead by Leoš Janáček performed by Pierre Boulez, Patrice Chéreau and Richard Peduzzi, opening performance Holland Festival 2007.
This first-class international production of Janáček’s From the House of the Dead will be the opening performance of the 60th Holland Festival and will take place with many leading figures in the audience. The opera will be mounted by the legendary artistic team of conductor and composer Pierre Boulez, director Patrice Chéreau and designer Richard Peduzzi. The three were responsible for the production of Der Ring des Nibelungen that opened the centenary Bayreuth Festival in 1976, a production that rapidly came to be regarded as one of the milestones of operatic history. The three maestri now work together again for the first time since then, on a production awaited eagerly by all those involved in the worlds of music and theatre. From the House of the Dead is a coproduction of the Holland Festival with the Wiener Festwochen, the Festival d’Aix-en-Provence, the Metropolitan Opera in New York and Teatro alla Scala in Milan. Such a collaboration between five internationally renowned festivals and opera houses is a feat that is seldom attempted; this is not merely a touring production of an unheard-of size, but one that is truly spectacular thanks to the participation of top-flight ensembles and singers, as the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, the Arnold Schoenberg Chor and Olaf Bär, John Mark Ainsley, Stefan Margita, Peter Straka and Wolfgang Brendel among others. The opera From the House of the Dead by Czech composer Leos Janáček is to opera what Picasso’s Guernica is to painting: they are both masterpieces of 20th century European culture and indictments of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man.